True Heroes...

Rose Valland

Rose Valland was a French art historian, member of the French Resistance, Captain in the French military, and one of the most decorated women in French history. The unassuming heroine of French culture during World War II, she was born in Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, France in 1898. She was highly educated in the arts, and she secretly recorded details of the Nazi plundering of National French and private Jewish-owned art from France. Working with the French Resistance, she saved thousands of works of art. Learn more here.

The Young Man in the painting Portrait of a Young Man

Portrait of a Young Man is a painting in oil on panel, probably from 1513–1514, by the Italian High Renaissance Old Master painter and architect Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino better known simply as Raphael. The painting was stolen from Prince Augustyn Józef Czartoryski around 1940 by the Nazis from Poland. Many historians regard it as the most important painting missing since World War II. The documentary film The Rape of Europa, suggested if the painting were to reappear today, it would be worth in excess of 100 million US dollars. His frame hangs empty at the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, Poland waiting his return. Learn more here.

Capt. Deane Keller

Deane Keller was an American artist, academic, soldier, art restorer and preservationist. He taught for forty years at Yale University's School of Fine Arts and during World War II was an officer with the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program. One of Keller's most significant wartime undertakings was his attempt to preserve the murals of the Camposanto, a medieval cemetery in Pisa. In July 1944, an American shelling started a fire that caused the frescoes to fracture. Keller organized art experts and enlisted men to protect the mural pieces and protect the cemetery from further damage. Restoration of the frescoes continues today. In recognition of his preservation efforts, an urn containing Keller's ashes was interred in the Camposanto in 2000. Learn more here.

The Woman in Gold (a.k.a. Adele Bloch-Bauer) in the painting Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt

This 1907 portrait of Adele was among several that had been hanging in museums after their confiscation by Nazi agents. It was returned to Adele's niece in 2004 after a long international fight that ended in the US Supreme Court. In 2006, Ronald S. Lauder bought the painting for a record price of $135 million. It now hangs in his Neue Gallery in New York City. Learn more here.

Adele Bloch-Bauer

Muse of then scandalous artist Gustav Klimt, her niece fought and won a present-day battle for ownership of the portrait of her aunt that is known as The Woman in Gold. In the Summer of 1903, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer asked Klimt to paint his wife’s portrait, intending it as a present for her parents’ anniversary in October. Among the prominent guests in her salon were the composers Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949). Learn more here.

Capt. Walter Huchthausen

By all accounts, Walter Johan Huchthausen was one of the most promising architects of his generation. Still, he served in the Army Airforce. He was wounded and later earmarked for service in the MFAA. While traveling to find looted art in Germany, he and a fellow soldier ventured into unsecured territory and Huchthausen was shot and killed immediately. His slumping body shielded his fellow and saved his life. Huchthausen thus became the second Monuments Man killed in action. He died on April 2, 1945, less than a month before Germany’s unconditional surrender. Learn more here.

Kenneth Lindsay

In 1943 Lindsay was drafted into the U.S. Army where he served as a cryptographer before his unit was called to the front. Landing at Utah Beach within three weeks of D-Day, he marched through France with U.S. Third Army. He then applied for a transfer to the MFAA. In July 1945, he was assigned to the Wiesbaden Central Collecting Point.

In 2013, the Binghamton University Art Museum opened The Kenneth Lindsay Museum Study Room in tribute to his “lifelong commitment to the study and protection of works of art and his inspirational teaching through direct observation and the immediate experience of works of art themselves.” Learn more here.

Charles Parkhurst

Charles Parkhurst was an American museum curator best known for his work on the Roberts Commission, tracking down art looted during World War II. Parkhurst enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943. He served in Sicily, Italy, Panama, and Australia before being transferred to the MFAA in April 1945.

Parkhurst located 1,036 repositories for looted works of art and other cultural objects in Germany alone. He made provisions for local security, compiled inventories, and noted information regarding the collection’s origin. He was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government. Learn more here.

Bernard Taper

In 1946 Taper was discharged from the U.S. Army in order to accept a position with the MFAA Section of the Allied Military Government (AMG) in Germany. As an art intelligence officer, he assumed the role of an art detective tasked with investigating and recovering works of art looted by the Nazis. Taper liaised with other U.S. Military Intelligence units and maintained relations with local German police forces to establish a vast network of information. He also recruited the German police, who helped the MFAA recover works of art looted from the Goudstikker collection which had been sold by Frankfurt art dealers during the war. In Munich, he investigated paintings which had been confiscated from the Adolphe Schloss family by the Vichy Commissioner of Jewish Affairs. Learn more here.

Claude Delibes

Claude Delibes was the daughter of Andre Seligman. Before the war, Andre Seligman dismissed from his esteemed Paris gallery leading Nazi Hermann Göring. Seligman knew what the Nazis were plotting. His was then the first gallery to be looted. A small pastoral painting called Les Jeunes Amoureux by François Boucher was part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after he fled Nazi Germany. The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector in 1993. David Dee, the museum's executive director, returned the painting to Mr. Seligmann's daughter and his daughter-in-law, Suzanne Geiss Robbins, in 2004.